On Mathematics in Art - Abstract
Clifford Singer

Meeting Alhambra, ISAMA-BRIDGES Conference Proceedings
Pages 559–560

Abstract

To say that mathematics is art is not to say that it is mere recreation. Art is not something, which exists to satisfy an aesthetic emotion necessarily. Art reveals to us some aspect of reality whether derivative or abstracted from geometric devices. This is possible because our knowledge and the external world are not two independent entities. Science has advanced enabling us to say that the external world is, at least very largely, our own creation; and we understand much of what we have created by understanding laws and rules, the laws of form and structure in accordance with which we must create. It seems that the mathematician, in creating art, is exhibiting that picture of our minds that has created the spatial material universe we know. Mathematics as much as concerns art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness and pictorial vision. The significance of art and mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our understanding and precision. We are the enactors of laws of the universe; it is even possible that we can experience nothing but what we have created, and that the greatest of our mathematical creations is in the material world itself.

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